Nintendo Doesn't Charge Devs To Patch Wii U Games

Earlier this year it was made rather public that developers have to pay approximately $40,000 per every game patch to the console owners...well, mainly Sony and Microsoft. Why is the cost so high per every patch? That's a good question. Well, Nintendo doesn't believe in extorting developers who make games on the Wii U and the cost to patch games will be $0.

“We have the power to price our products as we please, with just some basic guidelines from the big guys. The step to this is purely from Nintendo’s side and they clearly see that [their] previous installments have not been up to par. We can set our own pricing and actually continuing on that by setting our own sales whenever we want. It is very close to what Apple and Steam are doing at the moment, and very indie friendly.”

“Simply put, they’ve told us that there are no basic payments for each patch (which were pretty high on most platforms) and that we can update our game almost as much as we want. For indie developers this is huge.”

Not just huge, it's common sense. Why bereft developers of fixing up their game and making it a better more lucrative purchase by hampering them with financial barricades?

This very instance is why Fez's Phil Fish had to forfeit patching the game on Xbox Live, as reported by Game Informer.

Tim Schafer originally spilled the beans on Twitter, acknowledging that it costs about $40,000 for every patch on Xbox Live, limiting how many times a developer releases a patch and how big the patch is.

This could be a make-or-break implementation for a lot of indie developers, and should appeal greatly to them for bringing their games to Nintendo's Wii U platform. With greater design support from indie-friendly engines and integrated support for Unity Technology's Unity 4, this opens the door to a wealth of possibilities and all sorts of creative and innovative games that could potentially arrive on the Wii U.

The real question is if Nintendo will take advantage of this position to draw in indie devs and get hold of exclusive games that the developers couldn't afford to port to the PS3 or Xbox 360.